Facebook to share AI advances in image understanding

Facebook hopes technology; a blend of artificial intelligence and machine-learning, will be able to help blind people "see" images by enabling our computers to distinguish what is in a picture. It’s an incredibly sophisticated task. Next month, the company says it will present a paper detailing the progress it has made so far.

"Our AI research efforts – along with our work to develop radical new approaches to connectivity and our work to develop immersive new VR technologies – are a long-term endeavour," wrote Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technology officer.

"But if we can get them right we will be able to build systems that are smarter and more useful, enable developers to create immersive new experiences, and make it possible to connect everyone in the world."

"We see AI as helping computers better understand the world, so they can be more helpful to people. We’re still early with this technology, and you can already start to imagine how helpful it will be in the future," Zuckerberg writes.

Yann LeCun, Facebook’s head of AI research, likens artificial intelligence to the car. The car can move far faster than a human, which makes it great for transportation. But a car can’t paint by itself, or tell a joke, or lift a box. We’ve engineered incredible systems for specific tasks, but we’re still miles away from anything as generalized as a human.